M.L.S. Promotes Stadium at a Town Hall Meeting

Major League Soccer wants a professional soccer team playing in Queens by 2016. Tuesday night, the league demonstrated what a match in the borough might feel like. At the start of a town hall meeting the league hosted at Queens Theater in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, soccer fans chanted, hopped up and down, and danced to the beat of Latin music.

“Bring soccer to New York!” one fan shouted before the speeches began. The sound of a vuvuzela pierced the auditorium, and everyone cheered, waving the soccer-style scarves that were handed out to the standing-room-only crowd of about 400. It felt a lot like a soccer game. The biggest thing missing was, well, a stadium.

If M.L.S. has its way, a 25,000-seat stadium will gain city and state legislative approval in the coming months, and construction will begin in 2014. The town hall meeting gave the league an opportunity to present its plan to build the stadium at the eastern end of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, a site chosen over about 20 other locations around the city that had been considered, the league said.

“In the back of our minds, we knew the perfect place would be Queens,” M.L.S. Commissioner Don Garber said, adding: “We needed to go to a place where there was a passion for soccer. There’s no question that that exists here.”

During the two-hour meeting, the league also answered questions from the audience and highlighted the support it had mustered from the community, business leaders and local politicians.

Practically everyone in attendance seemed to favor the proposed stadium — including the girls’ and boys’ soccer teams dressed in track suits; union members still in hard hats; and a father carrying a baby whose bedtime had clearly passed. Many people in the audience carried homemade signs, enthusiastically (albeit prematurely) welcoming M.L.S. to Queens.